I had gone to sleep early Sunday night (August 8th), waking up just before 4 A.M. EDT this morning and turned on the TV, expecting to see coverage of the space shuttle landing (which has now been postponed a day; as a result, I'll be going back to sleep for a few hours) but instead, learning about Peter Jennings' death.
One thing I had failed to see noted in any retrospectives on his career was his short-lived stint (January-October, 1975) as the news-update anchor on ABC News' first attempt at an early-morning program, the ill-fated "AM America". Jennings had been brought back to the 'States from the Middle East for that assignment.
In the end, the replacement of "AM America" with "Good Morning America" may have been the best for Jennings' career, for he was able to return overseas and provide some truly top-notch reporting from the Middle East for the network. It wasn't that his work for "AM America" was bad; his anchor work there was much better than his first (1965-67) stint as ABC's evening news anchorman. It was that he had a perspective on the Middle East that perhaps no other broadcast journalist ever had.
Were it not for the outstanding quality of his reporting from late 1975 through early 1978, it's possible Jennings may not have been selected as part of the original triple-anchor team of "World News Tonight", and thus, would not have become "WNT"'s sole anchor in 1983.
And in time, Peter Jennings became a superior anchorman. His anchoring on September 11th, 2001 remains one of the greatest on-air reporting jobs in the history of American television news.